Nyt: ‘Trump secures a $1 billion mining deal with Kazakhstan. His sons stand to profit from it’

‘Trump has struck a billion-dollar mining deal. His children stand to profit from it.’ This is the headline of an article published today on the New York Times website. “An agreement between the United States and Kazakhstan,” it reads, “has secured a group of American investors, linked to the President and the Secretary of Commerce, access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten.”

According to the Manhattan newspaper’s account, when the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, met with the President of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, at the St Regis Hotel on 23 September in New York, President Trump joined the meeting by telephone whilst the men were finalising an agreement on a top priority for Washington. During the call, Trump and his team secured a commitment from the Kazakh leader to grant a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods. Prior to the agreement, the Trump administration had approved preliminary applications for federal funding of up to $1.6 billion for the American company, now known as Kaz Resources, which plans to launch the project in rural areas of Kazakhstan.

A few weeks after the negotiations at the St Regis, investors from a company called Dominari Securities — based at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the President’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — joined forces with other partners to acquire a 20 per cent stake in the business entity linked to the Kazakh project. Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment firm controlled by the Lutnick family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the main investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal to raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such fundraising rounds typically earn Cantor millions of dollars in commissions.

The Kazakh agreement was finally signed on 6 November, six days after the investment involving Trump’s sons and their partners – a deal that had not been made public at the time. This agreement is not an isolated case, the NYT reveals. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the project in Kazakhstan, according to federal documents examined by The New York Times.

“These kinds of deals are a warning sign,” said Maxine Dexter, a Member of Parliament for Oregon and the ranking Democrat on the House committee investigating allegations of wrongdoing in the mining sector. “Congress must ensure that taxpayers’ money is used in the public interest and not to benefit family members or those closely linked to the Trump administration,” Ms Dexter said in an interview.